23/12/2025
Wheew! I stumbled across something today that shifted the ground beneath me in the quietest way.
Gabor Maté was talking with Mel Robbins on her podcast, and he said something so simple it felt dangerous:
"No two children grow up in the same home. Even with the same parents."
I had to stop what I was doing and sit with that.
Because he's absolutely right.
The parent who raised the first child isn't the same person raising the third. By then, they've been reshaped by years, by disappointments, by small victories and accumulated exhaustion. The father might have softened with time or hardened from unmet expectations. The mother might have found her voice or lost it somewhere in the survival of keeping everyone fed and functioning. The marriage that held the first baby might be thriving by the second or unraveling by the third.
And the circumstances? They morph too. The family that struggled when one child was small might be stable when another arrives. Or the reverse. The house that felt full of possibility once might feel heavy with regret later.
Then there's us. The children. We arrive with different temperaments, different sensitivities, different ways of interpreting the exact same gesture. One child feels seen in silence; another feels erased by it. One flourishes under routine; another suffocates. The same embrace means safety to one and obligation to another.
Same roof. Same parents. Completely different childhoods.
This realization made me reconsider every story I've told myself about my family. How I've spent years comparing notes with siblings, arguing about whose memory is accurate, whose experience was valid. But maybe we were all right. Maybe we *were* each raised by different parents because our parents became different people between each of us.
And perhaps the real work of adulthood is making peace with this multiplicity. Forgiving the version of our parents who didn't have it to give. Honoring the version who gave anyway, despite having nothing left. Understanding that the love was genuine even when it wore completely different faces for each of us.
Because love isn't a fixed thing. It's organic, evolving, sometimes depleting, sometimes replenishing. Just like the flawed, beautiful, exhausted people trying their best to offer it.
You can watch that part of the podcast here:
https://youtube.com/shorts/l3NUPuoX5AM?feature
